Our Homeownership Saga

Living room with old paint color. In bottom left the contrast of the new and old colors can be seen.

The living room was the first room we worked on. It began with a dark and rather bland color of tan (click pictures for more detail). It was not a color we were particularly fond of and it definitely didn’t suit the space. It was doing a great job of subduing the natural light rather then enhancing it. With only two windows, one going to the porch, natural light is a little lacking in the living room. To help remedy this, I decided on a warm green known as “honeydew melon”. (See the palatte below for a better idea of the color I mean.) I had a hard time finding complimenting colors for the honeydew though. Black was obviously one of them, being as our furniture is black and we can’t afford to buy a new living room set yet. Black didn’t give me much to go on though. Some of the colors kind of fell into my lap when we decided to add a floor to ceiling bookcase to the room. It provided some amazing vertical storage. The color that was chosen for the bookcase was a light birch, which went well with the walls and floors. So now I had 3 colors, 4 if you count the white of the trim work. I then finally finished it off with the addition of a medium tone red. Not by any means a normal color mix for a living room but the contrast of green/red is very energizing and gives the room a lot of light.

Green is the wall color. Black is the secondary color. White, biege, and red are the accent colors.

Eventually the room will have the addition of our home theater system (projector, screen, surround sound, etc). But until we have time for that project the equipment sits in storage.

The extra large bookcase is two of the EXPEDIT bookcases from IKEA stacked on top of each other. This isn’t exactly how they were intended to be used. But after a quick Google search it was discovered that we were not the first people to have considered this application. Based on that we figured it would be safe to try it as well. As it turns out, stacked, they come within a half inch of our ceiling. So the likelihood of them falling is pretty slim since they would get wedged against the ceiling if they tilted. That, and they weight 130lbs a piece. So they aren’t going anywhere on their own.

Our stacked IKEA EXPEDITs

The coffee table we’ve had around for a while. But it too is from IKEA. Its a VIKA AMON table top with VIKA CURRY legs that we hacked down to coffee table height. It works very well and can be easily disassembled if we need to get it out of the way. It was partially the existing red legs on this table that inspired me to go with red in my color scheme.

In the back corner, holding up the tv, we have a square VIKA AMON table with VIKA ANNEFORS as two of the legs. This works great as a tv stand and also a cubbyhole for our Wii and small electronics. It’s tucked neatly behind our couch and loveseat so none of can be easily broken. We chose having the tv in the, non-traditional, back corner rather then front focal point, because we don’t usually use a tv. It is there mainly for the Wii and other game systems. We tend to dislike living rooms that are tv-centric anyway. A living room is a place to gather and interact.

I would like the addition of an area rug under the coffee table but that isn’t in the cards at this point. We also suspect that our Roomba (meet him below) might not like having a rug there.